Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Colony Farm industrialization

Metro Parks are scheming behind the scenes as usual to industrialize OUR parks. A sane person would think that they would learn from the previous experiment at the farm with the heavily publicly subsidized PICS farming experiment, that failed the minute it ran out very quickly of OUR money.!

Yikes ! A done deal, it appears; 5 Million of OUR dollars; those are some heavily subsidized vegetables.!

The best land of the farm is now mostly alienated by the Lougheed Highway corridor, and Riverview Hospitals arboretum. I have the detailed records of production and costs associated with Colony Farm/ Riverview growing years; and they never could have got the production that they sometimes achieved without the almost free, Huge patient labour pool. The high production came at a cost; they were using herbicides; pesticides, and there are well-documented records of pesticide resistant insect pests because of it.

Download the draftColony Farm Sustainability Plan (published way back in August, 2009)
I guess that there must be a Final report somewhere that the bureaucrats based their decisions on; or maybe not.
The September 13, 2011, Agenda where they voted it as a go.
And another draft plan, labelled with the cryptic Attachment_4

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

It is misleading to say that any type of farming that might take place is "industrial" farming. There are a lot of opportunities to have community supported agriculture at a scale that is appropriate and in incorporating best practices while at the same time addressing well-identified challenges to our own food security (i.e. shortage of farmers, access to land, keeping the food chain short etc, a still growing demand for local food). With farming being one of the original land uses at Colony Farm, it is unclear why your group feels the only food production that can be accommodated is community gardens - a tinkering at the edges solution to a much larger problem.

I myself have no problems with farming at Colony Farm, if it follows the original agreement the was agreed upon when the Park was created. This present proposal does NOT follow that agreement. And is more about wasting money on buildings being built on good farm land; completely subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Any farming should be able to pay its own way. Colony Farm has always been a hole in the ground that taxpayers poured money into, with very little returning back to the taxpayers. From what little that I have been able to find out about this "Academy" it is more about UBC wanting to destroy their agricultural lands, so that they can also put more buildings up at Point Gray.

Farm Cottage I

Farm Cottage II

Farm Cottage III

Farm Cottage IV

Farm Cottage V

Farm Cottage VI

Farm Cottage VII

Farm Cottage VIII

Any Questions?

Do you have any questions or feedback about the park. If so a
Send E-mail A "sustainability" visioning exercise, has been slowly moving along, pushed along by the GVRD. A draft report,(PDF) is available